No muse is good muse?

Jun. 25th, 2008

Hate is nothing. It has no power because it is no power; it is the denial of power and the celebration of weakness. To hate something declares that you can neither love it nor withstand it. To hate something erodes your grip on life.

Love sex, because it feels good. Love your best friend for feeling good, his body or her body in your arms, his words in your ears, her breath on your neck. Love your family for feeling good, the hot dinner or the lively conversation or all the familiar formulas of cohabitation. Love solitude for feeling good, the cool rush of the wind, the hot glaze of sun and sweat, the way you can truly inhabit your body when there is nothing else around. Love the world, for it feels good, whether you stand on top of Lafayette Mountain, looking across a wooded gorge six thousand feet deep to the Presidents Range, or lie in the sand on the beach of North Carolina's Outer Banks. Love innocence, because looking at the grinning laughing erupting face of a three-year-old, you know no one could be happier. Love experience, because when your great-uncle shares his last laugh with his best friend of eighty-two years the day before he dies, you know no one could mean it more.

Love life, because there is no better way to learn. Love life, because there is no other way to live.

Jul. 31st, 2007

Today I finished the second of two five-hour days of work for my mom in her library. She has a good fourteen thousand hardbacks and a thousand paperbacks, and as part of a reorganization she needed someone to:

1) Take all the hardbacks in the library.2) Shift them forward three shelves. (Imagine picking up ten books and shelving them three shelves further down. Repeat 1,399 times.)3) Interfiling all the paperbacks into the hardbacks, while keeping all the shelves about 2/3 full.

Besides the fact that the work was mind-numbing in the most terribly literal of senses (it made my mind dull and sticky as I did it, and even now I can't process as well as I'd really like to) it was an enormously positive experience.

It's amazing how many children's books were written by the same authors, but because you were too young to notice similarities in style (or at least too young to draw conclusions from them) you never actually noticed. The same wonderful woman brought me The Mixed Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler and The View From Saturday. E. L. Konigsburg, you're more of a powerful force for good in this world than I had known before.

It's also just refreshing to touch a lot of books. Many I've read; many I haven't; many I never intend to. But they're all books. My mother actually had to convince me of that. Though no one on this earth is more of an elitist than she when it comes to fiction (she loves her Henry James, and thinks Danielle Steele would do well to burn in hell), she (possibly due to nine years of being a teen librarian) acknowledges that you're simply not going to get a school of eighth and ninth graders to read John Updike, much less Henry James, especially a school where a typical honors English assignment reads "Write a letter to someone. Include a semicolon."

These are all books, and they're all doing good. It's not often that you can surround yourself with fourteen thousand different good things.

Jul. 30th, 2007

Never ever ever tear callouses off your feet because there's a blood blister underneath them that needs to be addressed, because your skin will bleed.

Even more never ever ever should you put Benedryl Anti-Itch Cream on them in the hopes that it keeps things from itching by being a topical anaesthetic. It gets into your bloodstream and hurts like a bitch.

Jul. 17th, 2007

Last night, I discovered a very special joy: that of coming across a friend.I'd never known I had had. That's an odd phrasing, because it sounds like we'd been friends before now, before we knew it, but I think that that's subtly true. Six months of being Facebook friends meant absolutely nothing, but one good night of conversation retroactively extended that friendship back that far.

People don't talk enough. I wish my days could take the form of a special kind of speed-dating: two hours with a (bottomless) cup of coffee and a friend, rinse and repeat. There are people in this world I love and never get a chance to talk to--or at least don't get to talk to enough. And coffee is just great, so hey.

I also need to work on my FreeCell addiction, because I still haven't finished my story update. Damn, it's been a while.

Jul. 15th, 2007

So it's sort of embarrassing to come back to a LiveJournal after a year or so and notice that you haven't actually made the entries that you swore to make. It's also sort of humiliating to feel the need to let the world know that you're embarrassed. Oh, well.

On that note, I should probably make an entry of some substance.

I've been running a lot, which is pleasant for a number of reasons. I really like the opportunity to open and close my days with some time alone. I'm always awake three hours or so after my parents are asleep, and this way, though my parents are always awake, I'm out of the house and away from them. I like running with music, but I really need better headphones for that. Mine keep falling out, and it's frustrating to no end: it's irritating to have to lift my hands to my head, especially when my shoulders are getting tired or when it'd throw off my pace.

My writing is stalling, which is frustrating. I'm working on a scene that draws a somewhat pornographic parallel to a rather famous work (okay, bestselling books of all time, whatever) but it's turning out to be harder to write than other scenes I've written for the same work. I'm not sure if it's because I'm lazy or if I'm trying to hold too close to the style of the original. I think I'll go at it later tonight and try to produce something, but I don't know what I'm going to manage.

My room, as of tomorrow, I think will finally be cleaned. That will be a big relief. I also need to make a Barnes and Noble run. And see a friend.

Aug. 7th, 2006

Well, I decided to purge the contents of my old entries due to embarassment and the fact that they're just not very interesting. Simultaneously, I don't know what real need I have for this besides keeping track of other people.

I'll probably do something with this, to be determined (and correspondingly announced) later.